And you are?: Terry Zavitz, founder of Zavitz Insurance Inc.

Terry Zavitz, founder of Zavitz Insurance Inc., always thought she?d become a music teacher, but entered the insurance industry after her father became critically ill. (KELLY PEDRO, The London Free Press)

This December, Terry Zavitz will step onto Australian soil and have travelled to all seven continents.

In Antarctica, she learned birds don’t sleep and watched as a whale calf learned from its pod how to catch a penguin.

In Africa, she met women who thought her camera was strange and took jogs through remote villages until the baboons joined in.

She’s climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro and come face to face with the tribes of South America.

Back on home soil, she rides her bicycle from Bayfield to London, skis the big mountains and has hiked in the Rockies.

“I take a lot of risks, that’s why I have insurance,” Zavitz said with a laugh.

As the founder of Zavitz Insurance Inc., she’s seen too many people get hurt by doing nothing and others who have led healthy, productive lives that have been cut short.

“It just happens, it’s reality . . . We see it all the time. Maybe that’s why I’m not as careful — it happens regardless,” she said.

Zavitz knows that story first-hand.

Her father was a 51-year-old physician who was never sick a day in his life. He was riding a roller coaster at a theme park one day when he had an aneurysm.

“Life changed then and there,” she said.

He was rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, where he spent months around nurses and doctors. During one surgery he suffered complications and ended up in the critical-care unit.

“Those were the most defining moments because you don’t just walk into a critical-care unit. You’re put in a small waiting room and other family members of other patients are in that waiting room.”

Zavitz’s father had disability insurance, but it was in that waiting room where she saw that financial implications for those who didn’t.

There she met a woman with two young children, whose husband had broken his neck. They were left with nothing, she said, and scraped for bus fare to get to the hospital and for rent.

“I could see people who were financially stable and people who weren’t because of this episode. It’s such a hard thing to go through for anybody, but if you’re going to put financial difficulties on top of it, it’s just a nightmare,” she said.

Zavitz understands why having insurance just in case is so important and it’s what has made her so successful.

Rewind more than three decades and Zavitz never expected to have a career.

A graduate from Western University’s musical arts program, she and her husband Doug bought a music studio in 1978 and Zavitz expected to teach music until she had children and settled down to raise them.

But as interest rates spiralled upward in the early 1980s and the recession set in, money became tight and Zavitz began looking for work to supplement the family income.

Having been through the experience with her father — and later shopping for disability insurance for herself and her husband — Zavitz answered a job ad in the newspaper for an insurance company specializing in disability insurance.

She was one of the first women the company hired in Canada as an adviser, in 1983.

She quickly developed her own clientele and Zavitz Insurance was born.

Zavitz Insurance began as a specialty company in the field of disability and life insurance and now also offers group insurance, helping clients through the process that many sometimes think will be adversarial.

“Sometimes there’s a negative aura around insurance — (people think) you’re not going to get paid and they (the insurance companies) are going to do everything to get out of it — but that’s not true. I’ve had very few claims that I’ve had trouble with,” she said.

“My job is to make sure financially you’re going to be as well off as you can be. I don’t want to be your problem.”

Over the years the company has grown and now has 14 staff, including Zavitz’s daughter Justine, who is an adviser, part of the management team and a shareholder.

Terry Zavitz said she didn’t have any formal training in business when she began the company, so she learned the ins-and-outs of running a business through trial and error. (She does, however, have several designations, such as a certified financial planner and chartered life underwriter, among others).

Through that trial and error she’s learned the value of working with good people and the importance of coaches and mentors to help grow a business.

And there are plans to grow the business with more advisers.

“The bigger you grow, the more you have to spread your roots. That’s where I’m going. That’s my total emphasis right now,” she said.

Zavitz’s business success and her volunteer work in the community were recognized in April when she was named as one of three leaders being inducted this year into the London and District Business Hall of Fame.

It’s far from the life she expected, being at home and raising children, but Zavitz doesn’t have any regrets.

“That didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen and I never had to think about, ‘Should I be home with my children?’ We would’ve been on welfare if we had done that, so I’ve never had to think about it and I’ve always been appreciative of that,” she said.

As the company grew and once her three children were old enough, Zavitz said she and her husband were “like kids in a candy shop. We started to travel like crazy and it hasn’t stopped.”

Travel has changed her perspective, offering her a window into different parts of the world, from Norway to remote parts of Africa.

“Travel allows you to have a broader vision of what’s going on and learn that we are so privileged. We, in London,” she said, “are so privileged.”

Education: Graduated from Western University with a bachelor of musical arts degree

Previous jobs: Music teacher

THE QUOTE:

We didn’t take the easy route. It was all about client service and constantly changing us so we were relevant to them, whether it’s the planning process or whether it’s at time of claim. Everybody here understands the importance of that concept.

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